George Bernard Shaw was born on the 26th of July 1856 in a modest house at 3 Upper Synge Street in Portobello, Dublin, yet his early life was defined not by privilege but by a profound sense of alienation. He was the youngest child and only son of George Carr Shaw, an ineffectual alcoholic, and Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw, a woman who had married for escape rather than love. The household was a place of shabby-genteel poverty, where music provided the only solace for a sensitive boy who found the rest of Dublin shocking and distressing. Shaw later recalled that his mother's indifference and lack of affection hurt him deeply, and he developed a lifelong obsession with the possibility that George John Lee, a flamboyant musical figure close to his mother, might have been his biological father. This uncertainty, combined with his hatred of four different schools which he described as prisons and turnkeys, left him disillusioned with formal education. By the time he was fifteen, he had left school to become a junior clerk, a position he quickly rose to as head cashier, but the experience of his childhood had already forged a man who would spend the rest of his life challenging the very institutions that had failed him.
The Self-Educated Polemicist
In 1876, Shaw moved to London to join his mother and sister, never again living in Ireland and not visiting it for twenty-nine years. He initially refused to seek clerical employment, choosing instead to survive on a reader's pass for the British Museum Reading Room, where he spent most weekdays reading and writing. His first attempts at drama and novels were failures, with his first completed novel, Immaturity, remaining unpublished until the 1930s. It was during this period of self-education that he met Sidney Webb, a junior civil servant who shared his hunger for knowledge. They recognized qualities in each other that complemented their own, developing a lifelong friendship that would shape Shaw's political awakening. By the mid-1880s, Shaw had become a respected theatre and music critic, writing under the pen-name Corno di Bassetto, and his views on art were fiercely didactic, rejecting the idea of art for art's sake. He believed that all great art must be didactic, and his columns were known for their mastery of English and compulsive readability, standing alone in their ability to make complex musical concepts accessible to the non-specialist.The Fabian Socialist
On the 5th of September 1882, Shaw attended a meeting at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon, addressed by the political economist Henry George, which awakened his interest in economics. He began attending meetings of the Social Democratic Federation, where he discovered the writings of Karl Marx, but he was not impressed by the founder, H. M. Hyndman, whom he found autocratic and lacking leadership qualities. Shaw preferred to work with his intellectual equals and, after reading a tract issued by the recently formed Fabian Society, he went to their next advertised meeting on the 16th of May 1884. He became a member in September and, before the year's end, had provided the society with its first manifesto, published as Fabian Tract No. 2. He joined the society's executive committee in January 1885 and later that year recruited Webb and Annie Besant, a fine orator. From 1885 to 1889, Shaw attended the fortnightly meetings of the British Economic Association, which Holroyd observes was the closest Shaw had ever come to university education. This experience changed his political ideas; he moved away from Marxism and became an apostle of gradualism, accepting the principle of permeation whereby socialism could best be achieved by infiltration of people and ideas into existing political parties.